What are the different ways in which we can understand gendered diasporic identities?

ROXANA BUITRAGO LEAL
POLITOLOGA CON MAESTRIA EN LATINOAMÉRICA,; MAESTRIA EN CULTURA Y sociEDAD (SOCIOLOGIA). DOCENTE-INVESTIGADORA DE TIEMPO Y COMPLETO DEL DEPARTAMENTO DE HISTORIA Y CIENCIAS SOCIALES UNIVERSIDAD DEL NORTE.

RESUMEN

Los estudios de género han facilitado la exploración del SIDA y la migración, entre otros problemas sociales, y han permitido una comprensión más sensible de las prácticas de discriminación que existen a su alrededor. En este documento se discuten los aspectos en los que los estudios de género han contribuido a evaluar las cuestiones relativas a la migración desde la perspectiva de género de la diáspora. Esta construcción sociológica de la diáspora abarca las muchas razones diferentes por las cuales los migrantes deciden abandonar su país, limitado por su origen nacional, racial o étnico, que se inscriben dentro de lo que se considera una motivación política fuerte. Aunque en este ensayo la discusión teórica de la diáspora de género de abarcará a los hombres, algunos críticos del concepto de género se han preguntado cómo la diáspora ha sido entendida tradicionalmente por los hombres. La primera parte de la discusión se regirá por la pregunta: ¿Qué es una identidad de género de la diáspora? El ensayo hará hincapié en la categoría de género de análisis. Se argumentará cómo las identidades de género se construyen en las circunstancias de dominación y opresión que se derivan de los desplazamientos. En primer lugar, la deconstrucción de la categoría social de la diáspora de género se evaluará, a través de un examen de Ella Shohat sobre la identidad. Se estudiará el término diáspora y sus ambivalencias y críticas. En la segunda parte de la discusión se considerarán tres casos distintos de las identidades de género de la diáspora cómo se entiende, entre ellas: las representaciones culturales de los cubano-americanos, la diáspora sij y mujeres armenias en Los Ángeles.

palabras clave: Diáspora, identidad de género, género y teoría de la migración, discriminación de género.

ABSTRACT

Gender studies has facilitated the exploration of Aids and Migration among other social problems, and has enabled a more sensible understanding of the discrimination practices that exist around them. This paper will discuss the aspects in which gender studies have contributed to assess issues regarding migration from the gendered diaspora perspective. This sociological construction of diaspora encompasses the many different reasons why migrants decide to leave their country, bounded by national, racial or ethnic background, which enroll in a strong political motivation. Although in this essay, the theoretical discussion will embrace male gendered diasporas as well, critics of the term have questioned how gendered diasporas have been traditionally understood of men. The first part of the discussion will be guided by the question: what is a gendered diaspora identity? The essay will emphasise the gendered category of analysis. I will argue how gendered identities are constructed under the circumstances of dominance and oppression that result from displacement. First, the deconstruction of the social category of gendered diaspora will be assessed, through an examination of Ella Shohat's agreement of identity. The essay will then examine the term diaspora and its ambivalences and criticisms. The second part of the discussion will consider three separate cases of how gendered diasporic identities are being understood, including: the cultural representations of Cuban Americans, the Sikh diaspora and Armenian women in Los Angeles.

key words: Diaspora, gender identity, gender and migration theory, gender discrimination.

What are the different ways in which we can understand gendered diasporic identities?

"I have always felt that the action most worth watching is not at the center of things but where the edges meet. I like shorelines, weather fronts and international borders. There are interesting frictions and incongruities in these places, and often if you stand at the point of tangency, you can see both sides at better than if you were in the middle of either one"

Anne Fadiman in the preface of The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down

Introduction

The elaboration of this essay is framed in time by two important dates, the International Aids Awareness Day on December 1^st and the International Migrant Day on December 18th. These two dates are critical because they embrace the awareness of the two social phenomena, which have increasingly been affecting the world's population. Aids and migration have become social problems and their assessment implies attention to constructions of the stigmas and discriminating practices that accompany these already turbulent situations. Gender studies have facilitated the exploration of Aids and Migration among other social problems, and have enabled a more sensible understanding of the discrimination practices that exist around them. This paper will discuss the aspects in which gender studies have contributed to assess issues regarding migration from the gendered diaspora perspective. This sociological construction of diaspora encompasses the many different reasons why migrants decide to leave their country, bounded by national, racial or ethnic background, which enroll in a strong political motivation. Hence, this political component has been interpreted by feminist theorists and transmitted more powerfully by women. Although in this essay, the theoretical discussion will embrace male gendered diasporas as well, critics of the term have questioned how gendered diasporas have been traditionally understood of men. The first part of the discussion will be guided by the question: what is a gendered diaspora identity? The essay will emphasise the gendered category of analysis. I will argue how gendered identities are constructed under the circumstances of dominance and oppression that result from displacement. First, the deconstruction of the social category of gendered diaspora will be assessed /through an examination of Ella Shohat's agreement of identity. The essay will then examine the term diaspora and its ambivalences and criticisms. The second part of the discussion will consider three separate cases of how gendered diasporic identities are being understood, including: the cultural representations of Cuban Americans, the Sikh diaspora and Armenian women in Los Angeles. These three examples of gendered diaspora are representative of the geographical and cultural variations; they all maintain the emotional and political burden that accompany diasporas and in this way they help to understand how subjects are constructed in a difficult displacement position which is justified by strong political reasons depending on the cases.

1. What is a gendered diaspora?

Gendered diasporas are studied through the construction of identities in a globalized world. Our globalized contemporary societies, have become an object of social, economic and cultural research. To begin to understand how migration is experienced one must first consider how identities are constructed everywhere. For that it is necessary to have globalization consciousness which considers the development of social practices and representations of numerous social actors everywhere (not just economic agents..)(Mato 2003: 283). It is also necessary to understand that the assessment of identities involves two schools of thought: the essentialist notion, which sees identity as inherited; and the post-structural notion, which views identity as constructed and determined by political motives. Academics of both schools agree that identities are the means we use to make sense of our experiences. Ella Shohat, for example, considers that identities are theories of how the world is viewed, and their assessment is the explanation of the "complex way they provide us knowledge about the world." (Shohat 2003: 356) A postructural construction of identities will be adopted in this essay in order to understand where and how the gendered diasporic identities are constructed. Hence, the political burden involved in the poststructural perspectives accompanies the construction of experiences, in different contexts, of a globalized world.

The gendered sociological category combined with the notions of diaspora arises from the need in sociology to consider gendered categories of men and women whilst they are on the move. This document argues that this sociological concept facilitates the explanation of the differences that are constructed in societies, particularly when it is a matter of gender based hierarchies (Jackson & Scott 1997:14). This hierarchized power relation implies a displacement from a centre, from a "homeland". It is a term which has been used to describe collective "real or imagined relationships among scattered fellows, whose sense of community is sustained by forms of communication and contact such as kinship, pilgrimage, trade, travel, and a shared culture (language, ritual, scripture or print and electronic media). "(Durham 1999, 35) The term diaspora offers yet another perspective from which we can enlighten the analysis of a cultural identity. In relation to this John Durham argues, that cultures are preserved by being protected from "mixing", but the fact is that probably they continue to exist exclusively as a product of such mixing. Hence, a diaspora's lesson in reference to culture is that "people and lands are not naturally and organically connected" (Durham 1999, 34); instead there is a social construction, usually political, which connects them.

The conceptual appraisal of a gendered diaspora, is a recent tendency that regards females exclusively. Magdalene And-lygate argues, it has been a decade that feminists begun to question the conditions of the male bias implicit in the assessment of diasporic perspectives. The latter view assesses women as the "other", when they are contextualized by historical and social circumstances. It is her focus of third-world diasporic constructions of women which accounts for the "hidden dimensions of imperialism in western culture and philosophy, thereby accounting for hegemonic notions of non-European peoples"(An-lygate 1996:239). This paper, however, supports the fact that gender¹ does signify unequal power relations, regardless if it is for men, women, gay etc. Here we consider just as Judith Butler does that the biological essences (sex) are always-already culturally constituted and that they therefore also reflect certain power-structures . Hence, the perception that there are two neatly divided sexes (men or women) for example is the product of the dominant heterosexist matrix which fosters unequal power-relations because it excludes gay identity.

The sociological construct of gendered diaspora enhances meanings and feelings of spaces for the people who migrate from one place to another. According to geographers, such as Katherine Sugg, interested in diasporas, the "here" and "there" dialectic is represented by the feelings that these two different spaces can produce. The notion of home the "there", for example, is understood as a place "for the family and a historical memory which becomes desexualized, partly through its association through childhood by contrast to the queered United States" ( Sugg 2003:386 ). Thus, the desexed zone is precisely for Sugg the point of entry for the family reunification and the repro-normativity that constitutes in part the notion of homeland. The "here" or the actual new place of residence, on the other hand, is differently constructed and adopts this connotation of loss and exile, bringing about other kinds of feelings and enabling other kinds of sexual subjectivities.

These feelings in the constructions of diaspora are particularly strong. Diaspora undertakes the exiled, the one that is considered to be at the foundation of the strapping feelings. Exiles experience a strong feeling of nostalgia of one's true home. According to John Durham, this true home, "can at its worst iconoclastically smash whatever does not measure up" (Durham 1999: 37). Thus, wherever there is something different that does not measure up, this works with the fantasy feelings that come to replace reality and the notions of well-being wherever one is located. The diaspora academics believe that nostalgia of the exile, is just like the quest for an earthly home. It is possible to transcend this discussion onto a philosophical question that which is the eternal quest for the completion of the human self, which for displaced people usually gets interpreted to be completed by the circumstances and the assets found in the new place of residence.

The gendered diaspora concept shares the multilayered social with the transnational migration perspective, with subtle differences. These two approaches share the transgressed features that deal with geography, citizenship and nationhood when people migrate. Both perspectives have been recently used to assess notions of race and gender. Albeit in this essay, the social race category will not be discussed, this two perspectives are very likely to be perceived as overlapping each other. Transnationalism, apart from being used mostly by anthropologists, (Bretell 2000) it has specifically been a term used in the United States to describe migratory workers and "transnational entrepreneurs". (Kandiyoti 2003: 3). As a result, transnational perspectives are more likely to tackle issues involving monetary remittances, from the homeland to the new host society, as well as all the socio-cultural features of people on the move. Consequently, some academics concern that transnationalism mainly considers privileged migrants.

Diaspora perspectives, conversely, have focused on the forms of dwelling and, if compared with transnational perspectives, have transcended the superficial assessment of economic networks. Diasporas engage with the movement and the struggles to define the local as a distinctive community, and involve historical contexts of displacements. Diaspora perspectives therefore, have emphasized migrants who are engaged in the local. Silvio Torres-Saillant affirms that transnationalism is indifferent to community-building activities in the host country, the determination of a transplanted person to grow their new roots, emerges quite natural from the diasporic perspective" (Torres-Salliant & Hernández, 1998: 434)

In the assessment of the feelings and the predominant themes of a gendered diaspora, there are academics that do not draw on the concept given its high ethnic and political values. For example Floya Anthias (1998), argues that the theory of diaspora does not transcend the ethnic-essentialist views, as it embraces excluding and hierarchized experiences. The exclusion patterns result from nationalisms and bounded notions of culture. Based on this precept, Anthias brings a dilemma into the discussion, for her diaspora remains with the ethnicity problematic. This means it continues to limit a contingent and a non-essentialist notion of identity. Paul Gilroy, however, diverges from this limiting view that can be attached to diasporas.

He affirms ".. .that they highlight a more indeterminate and, some would say, modernist mode in which a degree of alienation form one's place of birth and types of cultural estrangement are capable of conferring insight and creating pleasure, as well as precipitating anxiety about the coherence of the nation and the stability of its imaginary ethnic or cultural core." (Gilroy 1997:335)

Additionally, Elaine Underhalter believes there is a close link between post-colonial theory and diaspora, since they can be considered as processes that are decided in terms of their hybridity and that are constantly related to dominant discourses. The ethnic relatedness of the diaspora concept, additionally, embraces the feelings and experiences of exclusion and boundary building. Hence, these patterns of behaviour cannot be observed in more skeptical views like transnationalism. In particular gendered diasporas, embrace the real life dialectic that strong cultures face when they travel and how these additionally now pay attention to class, gender, positions and claims.

The following examples of diasporas will embrace the dialectic gendered diasporas face, which is the pull from the homeland, and the pull of the new home which enables different representations of identity particularly in reference to the movement of migrant groups and their gender. However, this essay will offer additional angles of subjectivity -ethnicity, gender, employment, mental health. The latter angles meld together and inform the diaspora subjectivity

2. Examples of gendered diasporas

2.1. Cuban-American

The Cuban-American diaspora is analized through two cultural representations, a theatrical script and a novel. This diaspora is located throughout the US, particularly in Miami and Chicago. Geographer Katherine Sugg analyses the representations made by Cuban-American authors Carmelita Tropicana and Achy Obejas. The chosen Cuban representations of exiles become sites for the production and negotiation of communal identities organized around "the nation" (Sugg 2003:464). It is a geographical point of view which I consider to be crucial for the analysis of place-related issues. Sugg affirms, they explore the way in which "the bodies, persons characters, texts and nations produce unsettling stories for gendered migrants and their relationship to the dyads of homeland-exile of both males and females." (Sugg 2003: 465). These two particular cultural representations emphasize the values that are constructed by the diasporic gendered identities and the close relationship they have with national values and symbologies.

Milk of Amnesia the first theatrical piece that portrays Tropicana's diasporic experience begins by relating a scene in which the main character, a girl named Carmelita, is attending an American school. Carmelita had recently arrived in the United States. She expresses the difficulties fitting in because she disliked peanut butter and jelly and she never drank her milk. This character remembers her unpleasant feelings when she was obliged to drink it. For Sugg, through Carmelita's experiences, Tropicana highlights the suppression of self in a migrant experience, of bodily senses and desires, as well as memory, that is necessary for Carmelita to embrace "America".! (Sugg 2003:465). For the women characters this experience becomes gendered as given there are different and multiple senses of belongings and different ways of approaching the dialectic which is felt when there is an absence of Cuba as the homeland. Carmelita signals a severe case of adult amnesia a complete loss of the sense of place, personal and cultural past.

Towards the end of the piece, Carmelita decides to take a trip back to Cuba as the process through which she is to recognize herself as a woman and member of the migrant group. In one of the crucial parts of the piece, she affirms to the doctor who is treating her mental illness, that returning to Cuba is the way of finding out who or what she really is. The character becomes diasporic when she establishes a connection between a home, which implies a "loss of memory", and her current place of residence, America. This example becomes a gendered diaspora, given it relies on the materiality of her specific travel from America to the homeland Cuba. Additionally, her condition recalls a nationalistic value of being a Cuban woman in exile which makes her suppress her collective memory, feelings and bodily senses.

"In particular both Tropicana and Obejas show how a particular nationalist Cuban diasporic politics of nostalgia carries the double burden of maintaining the 'homeland' through the collective memory of Cuban exiles in the United States and of asserting that this homeland was effectively 'lost' with the advent of socialism". (Sugg 2003: 345)

According to Sugg, Milk of Amnesia is, within the diasporic context that it describes, a very illustrative example of how the post-colonial issues are incident in the construction of gendered diasporic identities. Sugg argues, that this evidences the dyad relation which is put forward by the relationship between the politics of nostalgia (exiled) and the politics of assimilation. The end of the piece comes as Carmelita returns to America, which is the cure for her mental illness. Carmelita's experience in Cuba has a healing power as she recovers her memory by her travel "by which she affirms the collective and political nature of both history and memory" (Sugg 2003:343). Mental illness in Carmelita constitutes a way in which a gendered diaspora identity can be represented as the loss of exile memory is a loss of meaning for Cuba as the homeland of the diasporic subjects

The novel, Memory Mambo, shares the same geographical perspective yet the discussion undertakes a different direction, the normalization of both sexual and national identities. In this case the main character, Juani a lesbian Cuban immigrant in Chicago, does not react to the collective memory in the same way as Carmelita. Instead, Juani is constantly in a struggle to interpret her identity. The character

Juani becomes skeptical about whose memories are whose in her family. Juani migrated to America with her whole family, she therefore grows listening to stories of the migration experience all her life. At one point Juani realizes, she has not had any memory of her own about migration --instead she grows to collect her family's stories. Juani's confusion evolves to the point of not knowing which are the memories of their life in Cuba and of planning their escape by boat that cannot possibly be hers and asks

"if these aren't my memories, then whose are they ... certainly not my father's... if these were my father's stories, they would be wholly congratulatory and totally void of meaningful detail."(Sugg 2003:357)

Sugg elucidates the ambivalent relation the character has to the exile community and to her own family. In addition, Sugg points out how collective memories find their roots "in the combined function of both memory and of the mourning processes that accompany the trauma of exile." (Sugg 2003: 345) According to Marianne Hirsch mourning is something that claims you, seizes you and indicates that you are not in control of your affective relationship to loss. There is also an ethnic and nationalistic value attached to the concept of roots. The diverging point from this character to Carmelita, is the fact that this current one faces the additional lesbian identity.

The gendered diaspora, identity²from the Cuban example, is constructed through the nationalistic, political value of memory and a sexual identity . Both Juani and Carmelita are analyzed through their identities and their relation to the spaces they live as lesbians and migrants. Which is why, makes Juani's and Carmelita's secular lives as Cubans in America fit in the category of diaspora.

2.2. Sikhs around the world

What follows is the example of the Sikhs and their diasporic experience through a body and what it represents for the construction of a Sikhs identity. The context is framed in that of a post-colonial subject being interpreted throught a body whilst being migrants, and this makes the example gendered. According to Brian Keith, from 1849 to the present, Sikhs, have managed to construct different versions of the Sikh's gendered diasporic identity, hence we are not only addressing one homeland, but a grouping of homelands. As a result a group of iconographic characters from the Sikh nation have been dispersed throughout the globe. Sikhs are here chosen as an example of gendered diaspora which unpacks the complex relation of an inherited identity with the body and the political motive of their continued deterritorialization, when that same body is tortured.

The gendered body of the Sikhs is constituted by five "K" elements. All of which must be worn by: " Any men or women who claim to be Sikhs....the most prominent of the five K's is the kus or the uncut hair, the other four are the comb which is worn in the topknot of the uncut hair (kahngha), the steel bangel (kara), the sword or dagger (kirpan) and the distinctive shorts (kaach)." (Axel 2001:40) Currently, the turban is considered the most important iconographic symbol of the five K's, but actually not included in the five symbols. The construction of such an identity resulted from the cultural images of pictures, the strong political link with the colonial past and the current Khalistan project.

The strong political link of this identity is based on the struggle for Khalistan, an independent state in contemporary India for the Sikh nation. Khalistan is the territory the Sikhs wanted as their homeland which has not been yet conceded and is the project of the majority of a displaced Indian population. This call for a Khalistan comes from the desire of "a separation of the South-Asian subcontinent after the departure of the British."(Axel 2001: 84 ) The Sikhs basic political demand, Khalistan, had a crucial role within the diaspora until the 1970 (Axel 2001:117). The feelings in a diaspora become evident once more within the whole notion of what the Khalistan represents for the collectivity. It represents feelings of ambivalence towards a project of integration that has not been achieved. It is, therefore, constantly deferred by the multiple circumstances and long since India was no longer a colonial site.

The relationship to the body and the ethnic value that certain groups attach to it is a way by which Sikhs construct a gendered diaporic identity. In my opinion this relation to the body cannot be discussed without the interpretation of Anne Marie Fortier and her unpacking of Judith Butler's views. Fortier argues that the construction of a cultural identity is conscripted in group identity formation as sites for the display of cultural identity. And conceiving identity as performative means that identities are not reducible to what is visible, to what is seen on the body, but, rather, that they are constructed by the very "expressions" that they are said to be "their" results (Butler,1990:45) Thus, ethnicitiy cannot be reduced to the surface, yet the expression has frequently strong affirmations of what a group has to make a stand for.

The political struggle constitutes, then, a crucial characteristic of the Sikh diaspora, the violence that has degenerated from it. This has recently been considered by the Indian government as a source of rebellious acts which have to be severely punished through torture. The Amridhari Sikh body is the character of the Sikhs diaspora to be considered as the one from which the tortured body emerged. The tortured body is a source of subjectification for the diaspora as well. "In the past fourteen years, pictures of mutilated corpses of Sikh men have become a well known sight for most Sikhs living around the world." Keith's dedication to this particular type is given to the widespread "popularity of the images of the tortured body and the general importance Sikhs attribute to them"(Axel 2001:456). The tortured body has become the political motto of this diaspora and this is precisely what makes this example gendered as it works succesfully to create a political motive for the diaspora, given the attachment of the Sikhs identity to the body.

2.3. Armenians in the US

Political reasons seem to condition diasporas world wide, and this becomes evident once more with the third example of a gendered diaspora, the Armenians in the US. Armenian women use the mobile motherhood, which is explored by Armine Isahkanian. This empirical study in Los Angeles and San Francisco, focuses particularly on Armenian women and on their own testimonies of how they experience migration. These women's subjectivities are determined by the lifting of the iron curtain and the necessity to imagine new futures that provide an alternative option for all the "growing post-soviet poverty and hopelessness" (Iskanian 2002:34). A gendered migration has been a response to this political context and to some extent, normalized the existence of a diaspora around the world. As one of these women explains for herself: "when women return to Armenia from having worked abroad, they never tell you the real things that happened to them. They never tell their husbands, but never anyone else, since they are often ashamed of what they did there. I'm not talking about prostitution, but just even regular work such as cleaning and taking care of an old person is shameful" (Ishkanian 2002:43). "The shame (amot in Armenian) of doing work that is considered demeaning and a desire to appear clever instead of naive (hareef) prevents returnees from speaking candidly about the real conditions and wages in the west" (Ishkanian 2002:76)

The diasporic identity of Armenian women is constructed through the moralizing discourse that justifies all actions as serving the well-being of the family. It has been observed that for women, migration is not an atomized phenomenon; it is actually a migration that supplements the male migration that has been evidenced long since the women's migration began in 1997. The women's migration responds to, as noted previously, the decline in the economy and the growing racism in Russia, the slump in the jewelry industry in Los Angeles, the growing demand for domestic labourers in the global cities."( Ishkanian 2002:87). This current trend of migration pattern which is exemplified by armenian women also falls into the category of a gendered diaspora. Not only the political motive carries the burden of an ex-soviet republic but representations given to female subjects as migrants.

Interviews of armenian women that have migrated to Los Angeles illustrate the difficulties they have finding work. Izshakanian argues that the narratives reveal a strong discourse particualrly in reference to domestic work. Work is clearly justified, given it is for the "good of their families and that the work they are engaged in is honest and/or morally clean. When the migrants talk about themselves, the stories are about how they have met with hardships and worked hard to overcome them" (Ishkanian 2002: 90). Family also appears in the discourse and constitutes the main reason why these women go through these hardships is keenly assessed, from a perspective which is strongly unrecognized in the West. The family discourse is a sociological construction, which is being delegitimized "by authors that may consider how it is crucial to recognize that moralistic rhetoric deployed in the name of the family". (Stacey 1992:3) The key point being how this discourse of the family has been fuelling politics against or for, rather than helping actual families that impair the social fabric upon which they depend. These critiques have facilitated the development and analysis of all the moralistic value that gets attached to the discourse.

Similarly, the Armenian diaspora is emotionally charged and embraces a local to global migratory experience. Armenian's are a strong group of eternal survivors, their historical and political past is informed by a community which suffered a genocide in 1915. The figures and subjective constructions in one way or the other keep the characters of the moving drama rounded to a "particular place, a society, a community, a history and a culture." (Ishkanian 2002: 91). As observed in the Armenian case, migration is currently becoming a tendency and a transnational survival strategy worldwide. The exploration of this strategy, though the Armenians identity brings light, to a contradictory relation between the inherited (Armenian moral) and the new gendered diasporic identity. For the Armenian women the longed completition of self in the new migratory context implies a detriment in the inherited notion of identity. Given this context of migration is contradicted by previously held beliefs.

As a conclusion

To conclude I will gather the main aspects that have led the discussion of the constructions of a gendered diasporic identity . The three migratory experiences examples, cited above, have been interpreted as embracing the diasporic dialectic established by the meanings and feelings towards homelands and discourses which are informed by the ethnicity, gender, employment and health categories. These subjectivities involve discourses that get normalized in a migrant identity. Our first example of a lesbian woman who looses her collective memory in the cuban/american dispora. Her beliefs and feelings towards Cuba and her family show what a gendered diaspora is. Just as the Sikhs diaspora infers on the body and torture, hence the Armenian women in Los Angeles with a familiar and moralistic discourse about work and family.

Migration experiences have led people to imagine themselves and their families in new ways and to follow opportunities (legally or illegally) wherever they may lead to different and new contexts for their lives. Gendered diasporic identities contribute to the research that accompany humans in these processes, exploring the unequal social relations depending on genders which get established in the new migrational contexts. Its conceptual range is limited and explores only a category that does not embrace the totality of factors involved in a migratory experience. However, this sociological category is recommended to be a substantial part of the analysis of any migration research as it reveals inequalities that get tamed aspects which are apparently more incident, i.e economic and global factors.

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Notas

¹ "a social fact that is causally relevant for the experiences she [or he] has and the choices and possibilities that are available to her [or him]. Her [or his] world is what in it social power is sustained through the hierarchical organization of gendered groups, including the cultural meanings they share." (Mohanty 2003, 298) [brackets are my interpretation]

² Overall, the sense of "entrapment" that Juani faces, in which she has to deal not only with the nationalistic values of the memory but also with the sexual identity and the political struggles of it. Juani's identity in the novel shifts constantly from lesbian, Cuban, Puerto Rican, and a socialist, with an attachment to each that elicits ambivalent and unstable feelings